“Night of Desirable Objects” is episode two of season two of Fringe.
At a site laying pipe by a road in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, the crew are packing up. One man, as the radio mentions the disappearances of six Lansdale residents, says he forgot his gear. He heads to get it and spots something in the field next to the road. It looks like a blue hand. And it grabs him and drags him into the ground.
Olivia is being released from hospital in New York. As Peter escorts her to a car, Charlie is watching. Only it isn’t Charlie; Charlie was killed in the previous episode, “A New Day in the Old Town”, and the shapechanging assassin took his place. Charlie’s death wasn’t a huge surprise; he was fighting a shapechanger out of sight. And it perhaps explains why Jessup had so much of the focus of the episode on her.
Raymond, the worker who was dragged underground, is in a series of tunnels. He uses his lighter and finds his leg is hurt. There are skeletons and corpses and something humanoid approaching. The figure drags him away.
In Boston, Peter is asking Broyles if they have everything on the list. Yes, the FBI has signed off on everything Peter has asked for, but a C130 transport is proving tough to requisition. Peter says they won’t need it for this one. Pennsylvania. Peter was trolling the FBI database looking for cases similar to Olivia’s and found a town that has six people go missing over a few months. Four cases in which eyewitnesses said they just disappeared into thin air.
Olivia arrives at the lab where Walter and Astrid are recreating her car accident. Using a frog which is hurled through the air and photographed. Walter hasn’t been able to make the frog disappear, though. All the evidence suggests Olivia was missing from her car for at least an hour before she crashed through the windscreen. Astrid states that Walter thinks Olivia went to another world. Walter is right. Walter starts talking about parallel universes until Olivia jogs his memory and he realises he’s done this before. Olivia knows she went somewhere and thinks she met someone, but the rest she can’t quite remember. Walter is explaining how he was upset by her apparent death, and that she’ll be fine from the travel, when Peter arrives.
They arrive at the construction site on Lansdale. Sheriff Golightly says there are now seven disappearances and isn’t as immediately helpful as he could be. Walter suggesting someone peed in the sheriff’s gene pool probably didn’t help. Back at the sheriff’s office, he gets out all the flies and starts asking about their investigation, when Olivia hears a fly land and rub its legs together. Peter spots a fishing fly – night of desirable objects – and starts talking to the sheriff about fishing, which brings the sheriff around.
Olivia contacts Not Charlie who says he has an errand to run first. He visits the typewriter place and uses the typewriter in the back room to communicate with the other universe. Not Charlie didn’t look so good earlier; now he definitely doesn’t.
Peter and Olivia are looking through the files in the lab and Walter is playing with a substance found where Raymond disappeared. He calls Peter; the substance is a paralytic. And its base is mutated human DNA. Olivia asks Peter if he remembers her mention Andre Hughes. It seems Hughes was seen at a few of the places where there were disappearances.
In the tunnels, a man finds Raymond’s body. He isn’t happy and starts digging with a spade.
Peter and Olivia arrive at Hughes’s home (it’s the same farmhouse used in The X-Files episode “Home”) and it seems Hughes is the man with the spade. Inside, he’s being chatty when Olivia hears breathing. She asks if there’s anyone else in the house. He says not. Olivia tells Peter there is and to keep Hughes occupied. Upstairs, she finds a lab, which is a surprise. She hears breathing from behind a door, but the other side is just shelves. And then she nearly shoots Peter.
Hughes is clearly connected to whatever is doing the killing. And Olivia keeps having bursts of super acute hearing. And then there’s Not Charlie, who is being told to make Olivia remember what happened.